Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, Logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.

It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.

For more info, see http://logstash.net/

Logstash Plugins

AKA "Where'd that plugin go??"

Since version 1.5.0 beta1 (and current master) of Logstash, all plugins have been separated into their own repositories under the logstash-plugins github organization. Each plugin is now a self-contained Ruby gem which gets published to RubyGems.org. Logstash has added plugin infrastructure to easily maintain the lifecyle of the plugin. For more details and rationale behind these changes, see our blogpost.

Elasticsearch logstash-contrib repo is deprecated. We have moved all of the plugins that existed there into their own repositories. We are migrating all of the pull requests and issues from logstash-contrib to the new repositories.

For more info on developing and testing these plugins, please see the README on any plugin repository.

Plugin Issues and Pull Requests

We are migrating all of the existing pull requests to their respective repositories. Rest assured, we will maintain all of the git history for these requests.

Please open new issues and pull requests for plugins under its own repository

For example, if you have to report an issue/enhancement for the Elasticsearch output, please do so here.

Logstash core will continue to exist under this repository and all related issues and pull requests can be submitted here.

Need Help?

Need help? Try #logstash on freenode irc or the logstash-users@googlegroups.com mailing list.

You can also find documentation on the http://logstash.net site.

Developing

To get started, you'll need ruby version 1.9.x or above and it should come with the rake tool.

Here's how to get started with Logstash development:

rake bootstrap

Other commands:

# to use Logstash gems or libraries in irb, use the following
# this gets you an 'irb' shell with Logstash's environment
bin/logstash irb

# Run Logstash
bin/logstash agent [options]

Notes about using other rubies. If you don't use rvm, you can probably skip this paragraph. Logstash works with other rubies, and if you wish to use your own ruby you must set USE_RUBY=1 in your environment.

Drip Launcher

Drip is a launcher for the Java Virtual Machine that provides much faster startup times than the java command. The drip script is intended to be a drop-in replacement for the java command, only faster. We recommend using drip during development.

To tell Logstash to use drip, either set the USE_DRIP=1 environment variable or set JAVACMD=`which drip`.

Caveats

Unlike nailgun, drip does not reuse the same JVM. So once your app quits, drip will launch another JVM. This means that if you try to re-run Logstash right after it exited, you might still have a startup delay

Testing

There are a few ways to run the tests. For development, using bin/logstash rspec <some spec> will suffice:

% bin/logstash rspec spec/core/timestamp_spec.rb
Using Accessor#strict_set for spec
.............
13 examples, 0 failures
Randomized with seed 8026

If you want to run all the tests from source, do:

rake test

Building

Building is not required. You are highly recommended to download the releases we provide from the Logstash site!

If you want to build the release tarball yourself, run:

rake artifact:tar

You can build rpms and debs, if you need those. Building rpms requires you have fpm, then do this:

# Build an RPM
rake artifact:rpm

# Build a Debian/Ubuntu package
rake artifact:deb

Project Principles

• Community: If a newbie has a bad time, it's a bug.
• Software: Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.
• Technology: If it doesn't do a thing today, we can make it do it tomorrow.

Contributing

All contributions are welcome: ideas, patches, documentation, bug reports, complaints, and even something you drew up on a napkin.

Programming is not a required skill. Whatever you've seen about open source and maintainers or community members saying "send patches or die" - you will not see that here.

It is more important to me that you are able to contribute.

For more information about contributing, see the CONTRIBUTING file.